Sounds geeky, right? It is. But like the most fantastic collisions of music and technology, it feels magical. And in an iPod era, where bite-size MP3s have threatened to vanquish the traditional album format, Bluebrain is helping redefine what an album can actually be. Somewhere, Sgt. Pepper is smiling.
The app contains nearly three hours of meticulously composed music that transforms as you navigate 264 zones across the Mall. If you stay put, the song remains the same — music will loop in intervals that last two to eight minutes, depending on your position.
The point is to keep moving. Approach the Capitol dome, and you’ll hear an eerie drone. Climb the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and it’s twinkling harps and chiming bells. As you wander from zone to zone, ambient washes dovetail into trip-hop beats and back again. The music follows you without interruption, the way a soundtrack follows a protagonist through a movie or a video game. When you leave the Mall, the sound evaporates into silence.
“It’s like a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ of an album,” says Ryan Holladay, citing the series of children’s books narrated in the second person. “The music is fluctuating based on your chosen path.”
Bloggers at Wired, Engadget and Fast Company have showered the project with enthusiastic keystrokes, but the Holladays are hoping that “The National Mall” will transcend tech-circle buzz and push other artists to re-imagine the boundaries that define an album in the digital age.
To help that push, the app won’t cost a penny to download.
“It’s the Mall,” Ryan says. “You don’t pay for anything down there.”
DIY-recording generation
Music has never traveled as rapidly as it does today. Thanks to the Internet’s numerous musical outlets — Pandora, iTunes, YouTube, the scrum of social media — a song can be shared globally and instantly. That’s huge.
For musicians, technology has kept up on the production side of the equation. In the past decade, software such as Apple’s GarageBand and digital-audio workstations such as FruityLoops have revolutionized the speed and ease of do-it-yourself recording and production.
Peter Kirn is the editor of Create Digital Music, a Web site that follows developments in recording technology. “It’s cheaper, it’s easier, it works better,” Kirn says of the programs that fueled the home-recording boom. “So people are doing more of it.”
Bluebrain is a part of the DIY-recording generation, but, Kirn says, the group’s latest endeavor underscores the next step in the fusion of art and technology. “The separation between the musician and the developer has significantly blurred,” he says. “People are getting actively involved in what they create, and I think that’s pretty radical.”
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